A Scalable System for Ingestion and Delivery of Timed Text

Offering the same great Netflix experience to diverse audiences and cultures around the world is a core aspect of the global Netflix video delivery service. With high quality subtitle localization being a key component of the experience, we have developed (and are continuously refining) a Unicode standard based i18n-grade timed text processing pipeline.  This pipeline allows us to meet the challenges of scale brought by the global Netflix platform as well as features unique to each script and language.

In this article, we provide a description of this timed text processing pipeline at Netflix including factors and insights that shaped its architecture.